We left John and Bev’s house at around 09.45 and said our farewells to Bev, who had been a fantastic hostess and looked after us extremely well, including acting as a taxi service to and from the Railway station amongst other things. Both Maureen and I hope that we get the opportunity to return the hospitality at some time in the near future. John had offered to take us to the Avis depot to pick up our hire car, which was just near the airport. Unfortunately, when we got to the address, there was no sign of an Avis depot! A phone call to their contact centre confirmed that the address supplied on our voucher from the travel agent was for their call centre in Sydney!! John then volunteered??? to take us to the airport when the Avis operator said they would transfer the car to the airport and not the city office, where we were supposed to collect it from. Then they changed their mind and we had to go to the office in Kings Cross, Sydney. By this time I was not too happy as Avis simply stated that it was not their fault that our agents had put the wrong address on the voucher. I’m pretty sure that John was getting fed up as well, but he didn’t show it and said he would take us to Kings Cross. Eventually we found the office and picked up the car. We said our farewells to John and sincerely hoped that they will find some time to visit us next time they are in the UK.
We had planned to go to Bondi Beach before heading over the Harbour Bridge and up the coast, so map in hand we navigated our way to the beach. It was just as I remember it from 1975, apart from some additional development. We strolled along the promenade, stopped for morning coffee at one of the cafes in Bondi Pavillion and watched the bronzed bodies go past. We went the full length of the promenade and returned along the beach and up to the Bondi Icebergs all year swimming club. The only icebergs these guys see must be the ones that goes in their G&T’s as there’s certainly none in the winter seas here.
From Bondi, we headed back to the city and over the Harbour Bridge, which I had walked on Just a couple of days earlier. We were navigating the roads quite well until a small slip gave us about a 30 minute detour to find the main highway again. Back on track, we were heading for our first stop at Tuncurry & Forster. Once out of the city suburbs, the motorway journey was fairly boring as the road has been cut through dense bush and it goes on forever with the same scenery. As we had spent so much time at Bondi, coupled with the late pick up of the car and our little detour, we were running somewhat late. However, we were determined to reach Tuncurry and find some suitable accommodation before dark. Well, we fulfilled one of our objectives in that we found some good accommodation, but regrettably the light run out a while before we reached our destination, which was a great shame as the scenery coming up through the lakes was probably pretty good compared to that of the bush. We checked into a motel that was very clean and tidy and for a couple of dollars extra we were able to get a half decent breakfast in the morning without having to ferret out somewhere in town. As we had stopped at one of the service areas on the motorway, we decided not to eat dinner and get some rest after a tiring day.
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